On July 28, 1948, my parents and I arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax as displaced persons following World War II. I had turned three years old during the voyage. We travelled on a Greek ship, the Nea Hellas, which departed from Genoa, Italy, earlier that month. My parents were Polish Jews whose families had […]
Ukraine, subjugated and brutalized by communism and fascism, seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991 and finally achieved its independence and freedom. But since then, in its attempts to break with its past as a servile Soviet republic and embrace a modern European identity, Ukraine has embarked on a crooked path and taken to whitewashing its […]
Bryan Cranston is back in the drug business. In the popular Netflix series, Breaking Bad, he played a high school chemistry teacher who moonlights as a methamphetamine manufacturer and distributor. Now, in Brad Furman’s The Infiltrator, which opens in Canada on August 12, he portrays a U.S. federal agent posing as a money launderer in […]
Capitalism in its rawest incarnation rears its ugly head in Equity, Meera Menon’s Wall Street thriller due to open in Canada on August 12. Tough-minded wheelers and dealers, their eyes on the main chance, appear and reappear in this hard-eyed account of an investment banker eager to advance her career as she cobbles together an […]
Sugar can be a killer, linked as it is to Type 2 diabetes, heart ailments, fatty liver disease and obesity. Excessive consumption of sugar can also lead to the onset of oral health issues such as tooth decay, cavities, and gum disease. Incidentally, whether you are someone who tends to enjoy too many sweet treats […]
Scores of civilians in Turkey have been killed in attacks attributed to Islamic State in the past year. The worst of them were perpetrated by suicide bombers in the city of Suruc in July 2015, in Ankara last October, and in Istanbul airport almost two months ago. Due in large part to these and other […]
Visitors to Israel usually spend their time touring cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Nazareth and tend to overlook off-the-beaten-track destinations further afield. I didn’t want to make that mistake. So on one of my trips to Israel, I made a point of visiting several of the natural wonders in the Galilee: Mount […]
Seventy one years have elapsed since the end of World War II, yet Poland still labors under a dubious distinction. It’s the only country in the former Soviet bloc that has not enacted restitution legislation that would enable Polish Jews and their heirs to reclaim personal properties they lost during the Holocaust and the Communist […]
It has been a bad month for Germany. A very bad month. Since July 18, Muslim terrorists of Afghan, Iranian and Syrian descent have carried out attacks in four German cities — Wuerzburg, Munich, Ansbach and Reutlingen — and killed 10 people and injured nearly two dozen. Two of the attackers were Syrians who had […]
We live in a fraught era when Jewish-Muslim tensions are flaring, not only in the Middle East but in European countries such as France. Has this always been the case? Historically, how tolerant of Jews have Muslims been since the birth of Islam in the Arabian peninsula? Bernard Lewis, the distinguished scholar of Middle Eastern […]